Peach Pie — Of Memory, Family, and Home
By Dana Jerman
“The still point of the turning world- neither from nor towards.”
—T.S.Eliot
Memory is a well shuffled deck. The best play is achieved when things are out of order.
On this same day two decades ago, I'm a kid sitting across from the garage at my grandparents house in a wide yard full of green clover watching a pair of lazy bees trade blossoms. Chatting with Dad as he washes the family car, his car. This he loves to do and his mood is good. I marvel gently in my role — the eldest sprung from young parents, themselves middle and youngest children. We chat about parents and love and dear things in company and confidence. I have since forgotten the content of our conversation, but not that it happened, or how it made me feel. It's the last of something, because it feels like the beginning of something else.
Extended family beckons toward a lakeside place where those same confidences have devoted their fine and final summer. Last white lies are told through smiles amid the boxes. Midday light discovers new purchase while we pause to glorify glimmers on the waterfront.
Mother-in-law, to whom I was introduced and brought here for the first time by a storyteller who is not present, tells her own story of her old mother on her death bed sitting up and using her last breath to say “Peach pie". Everybody has a Rosebud — the icon for symmetry and good life. A slice of heaven. The taste lingering from livings greatest offering: home.
Vegas, getting married here, was a joke and not. An exercise in going to the depths of the profane to retrieve something sacred. The ethereal magic of it was meant to be gathered in a unique moment, then built upon as only we two might on a foundation of color and starlight. Glitz on sand.
To then return to the site of this mine explosion of love and try to make a home — absent now of invitation or reason outside of my inheritance — the milky way hiding in my DNA…
This is not my incredible husband. These are not my beautiful dreams.
Letting the days go by...
I talked to a writer friend today. A fantastic and prolific poet. Someone I went to school with. We learned a lot about writing from a lot of the same people. Poet philosophers who showed us how to use the tools we already possess to polish and verbicise the arrogance which lies at the very heart of the human condition. To mine this impulse buried into everything deep. From the urge to take selfies to the number of children one believes it necessary to have in order to establish a family. Knitted into consumption, desire and expression is this essence which expands and contracts like a lung whose air is self-esteem and self-worth. Even within extended families, we must always return to ourselves.
I have these late-calling ideas of how I’ll reprioritize my life after loss. Particularly the loss of my one truest love. How I’ll live like a neon monk. Like so much of Mandelbrot’s garbage and stolen memoir, never looking out for true love again. He says it’s a safe way to play life, and he’s not wrong. Choosing to not invest to keep hurt at bay. But healing takes a whole life. Sounds as dramatic as moving to an orphanage in eastern Europe. Guess I’ve always thought it best to see past my own dreams just as quickly as I can. Can’t escape anyhow when new ones come to stake claim.
Who are you when any little bit of you came from everyone you know? Year forty could, in addition to cultivating leisure and creating art, be about teaching sex ed and helping women escape religious persecution. Making that fearless jump at the limit of vision. Aperte de vue. A call back to the great writer Georges Bataille. Purpose divined from flinging oneself into the well of darkness.
Forty-minute layover at O'Hare. Got to the gate for the next plane and started crying. Crying and couldn't stop and didn’t want to. The sort of passionate crying you must do silently when in public; your face growing wet as if you were out in the rain. Where it came from I still haven't figured out. It felt good, but I knew as soon as I got back in the air it would go away. Which was sort of true...
What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to forgive?
I’m sad I had to break up with Chicago. That it wasn't a forever home. I'm almost angry that it made me feel this way. Violent sadness tumbling down into melancholic relapse.
Ah, but we’re all grown up now. The fever dream of childhood is a husk…
My tears bunch over shards of an angels’ heart in the form of paper towel on the dusty floor. I scan the grey clouds and fuss in my sobs. I catch my breath and sniff and shake my head. The glue of time will have to be relied upon again, like always, to heal the big picture.
Hello, goodbye, I'm off. This destination another in on long path dotted with peach pies and alibis, toward elsewhere.